Disney tips benefit businesses

Monday

Apr 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2012 at 11:59 AM

ORLANDO, Fla. - Maryland teachers were instructed to engage with children by crouching and speaking to them at eye level.Chevrolet dealers were taught to follow theatrical metaphors: onstage, greeting potential customers with smiles; and offstage, taking out-of-sight cigarette breaks. Such personal-service tips came from the Disney Institute, the low-profile consulting division of the Walt Disney Co.Desperate for new ways to reach consumers, an increasing array of industries and organizations is paying Disney to teach them how to emulate Disney.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Maryland teachers were instructed to engage with children by crouching and speaking to them at eye level.Chevrolet dealers were taught to follow theatrical metaphors: onstage, greeting potential customers with smiles; and offstage, taking out-of-sight cigarette breaks.

A children’s hospital in Florida was advised to welcome patients with an entertaining approach, prompting it to employ a ukulele-playing greeter dressed in safari gear.

Such personal-service tips came from the Disney Institute, the low-profile consulting division of the Walt Disney Co.Desperate for new ways to reach consumers, an increasing array of industries and organizations is paying Disney to teach them how to emulate Disney.

Revenue from the Disney Institute has doubled during the past three years, according to Disney, powered in part by its aggressive pursuit of new business.

Clients range from large entities — Haagen-Dazs International, United Airlines, the country of South Africa — to small ones: three Subway restaurants in Maine, a Michigan hair salon, a Boston youth counseling center.

The Disney Institute recently hired a network of field representatives to sign up clients and started dispatching its executives to companies wanting help; before that, advice seekers traveled to Disney World in Florida or Disneyland in California.

“We’re putting our people on planes all day every day, domestically and internationally,” said Jeff James, who runs Disney’s consulting branch. “Some clients are in great shape and want to improve even further, and some are truly clueless.”

James said the up-and-down economy has put pressure on companies to pay more attention to consumers’ needs. He also cited the importance of the Internet, which “gives unhappy customers a megaphone.”

Disney, which employs 64,000 people in Orlando alone, has its own employee difficulties, of course. Union spats arise, and some employees chafe at the company’s strict rules, although it recently lifted a facial-hair ban and now allows women to forgo pantyhose. Disney’s sugary customer service can also startle visitors who aren’t used to so much uniform cheerfulness.

But vast numbers of consumers love it, and the company is routinely showcased in business books, such as The Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company, for its hospitality and efficiency. For instance, the company has spent so much time studying its park customers — more than 120?million of them globally last year — that it places trash cans every 27 paces, the average distance that a visitor carries a candy wrapper before discarding it.

That attention to detail is what compelled Frank Supovitz, the National Football League’s senior vice president for events, to hire Disney to help with this year’s Super Bowl, after a seating debacle at the 2011 game. Disney devised and executed a training program for the game’s 20,000 staff members and helped coordinate crowd control.

“We wanted those 20,000 people to internalize a sense of pride in their part to play,” Supovitz said, adding that he planned to hire Disney again next year.

Sometimes the Disney influence is more noticeable. Florida Hospital, a 22-campus chain, now employs the ukulele-playing greeter and exhibits what Tim Burrill, a vice president of the chain, called “calming video art” elsewhere. The hospital installed recessed lighting in hallways after Disney researchers found that patients on gurneys didn’t like staring at fluorescent bulbs.

Disney has been marketing its services to hospitals in advance of a new government requirement that patient-satisfaction surveys be reported online; starting in October, billions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements will be linked to the scores.

Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet sales and service, said: “Some dealers were very skeptical. We had to explain that this was about taking the best things about Disney and applying it to our own culture. We’re not going to be building castles and dressing people up in costumes."

“We needed some help figuring out how we can really excite our customers by doing lots of little things really well,” Batey said. So far, ideas include improving children’s play areas and returning vehicles to owners with dealer-branded bottles of water in the cup holders.

Disney got into the consulting business by accident after being featured in the 1984 best-seller In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman. So many corporations started asking for tips that the company created a program in 1986 called the Disney Approach to People Management and formalized the business a decade later with the opening of the institute.

James wouldn’t say how much the institute earns, but it is a financial drop in the bucket for a conglomerate with annual global sales of $41 billion. Fees range from $900 a person for a one-day workshop to hundreds of thousands of dollars for on-site work.

“Companies come in and say, ‘Just make my employees smile more,’??” James said. “But you can’t take Disney and just plug it in. We can advise them on how to change, but the heavy lifting is theirs.”

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